


we have not touched the stars

by purplefennels7



Series: ex luna, scientia [1]
Category: Apollo 13 (1995), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Anxiety, Apollo 13 - Freeform, Drama, I Believe in Jasper Sitwell, M/M, NASA, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Outer Space, Pining, these idiots somehow find time to pine in a crisis
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2020-01-05 12:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18366353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplefennels7/pseuds/purplefennels7
Summary: eleven months ago, man first stepped foot on the moon. and in eleven short months spaceflight became the norm, not the exception. natasha romanoff, steve rogers, and clint barton don't expect their mission, unlucky number thirteen, to be anything but.but space is a cruel mistress, and fate even crueller, and murphy's law always applies. whatever can go wrong, will. and it does. and it'll take everything that the crew and mission control can give to bring them home.





	1. learn to steer by the stars

**Author's Note:**

> the idea for this fic was born at one in the morning after watching apollo 13 for the 12302983rd time, and it somehow turned into my magnum opus. i owe the greatest thanks to [lance](https://darkipliers.tumblr.com) and [jordan](https://natasharomanovs.tumblr.com) and half of my irl friends for letting me rant about it in increasingly vague terms. 
> 
> honourable mention goes to excel because i made so many spreadsheets for this fic  
> title is from richard silken's [poem](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/370891-we-have-not-touched-the-stars-nor-are-we-forgiven).

Clint tightens his fingers around the attitude controller and thumbs the push-to-talk button at his belt. “Okay, Houston, we’re turned around now and preparing for lunar module capture,” he says.

“Roger, Fourteen,” Wanda Maximoff replies from her console.

“Thrusting forward.” Clint smirks as he pushes the controller forwards, and he briefly considers making the dirty joke that pops into his head. Natasha whacks him on the arm before he can even get his mouth open, though, and he glares at her out of the eye not pressed against his scope. 

“50 feet,” Steve says from his other side. The image of the docking target grows slightly larger, drifting upwards as it approaches, and Clint tweaks the thrusters until it settles neatly on center. 

“30 feet.” 

“Clamps,” Clint snaps out, and Natasha leans forward to hit a button on the instrument panel. A second later, the dull thunk of the docking clamps extending sounds in their headsets, accompanied by a vibration, and if Clint couldn’t hear the muffled sounds of the controllers bustling around on the bay floor outside, he could almost believe that they were up there in a real command module with a real LM looming in the windows, surrounded by vacuum on all sides. 

“20 feet.” Clint considers easing the controller forwards again, sending the camera, mounted on a rolling track outside the simulator, moving just that little bit faster. It’s the end of another excruciatingly long day on their backs in the simulators, and even though he would normally enjoy the training - any time spent with his command module is well spent - he still knows that they don’t fly for twelve more months and he really just wants to go home and order a pizza. 

“10 feet.” Lost in his own thoughts, Clint doesn’t notice the target drifting off center until Natasha, peering through her own scope, jabs him in the ribs with her (very pointy) elbow. 

“Focus,” she chides when Clint yelps. He pinches himself mentally, because he has a reputation and he intends for it to stay that way. He’s Hawkeye; he catches the target every time, and uses the least fuel to boot. The pizza can wait.  _ I guess. _

Steve counts down the last five seconds, and the little grey squares that indicate docking status click over to black and white stripes.

“Houston, we have capture,” Clint grins triumphantly. 

“Roger, Fourteen, good work. You’re dismissed,” Wanda says, and Clint can hear her smiling. He unbuckles the straps holding him against his cloth couch and taps Natasha on the shoulder, accepting a congratulations from Steve as he goes. 

“Hey Nat, how does my fuel use look there?” Natasha leans over to check the gauges, and flashes him a thumbs-up.

“Looks good, better than last time. Under the curve like always.”

“Sweet. I bet they’ll have us back at it tomorrow anyways, you know how Fury gets. You’d imagine we were shipping out tomorrow, not next year.” Natasha rolls her eyes and scrambles out of the simulator, holding out a hand to help Clint and Steve out after her. Clint blinks in the bright fluorescent lights of the high bay, squinting to make out the clock mounted high above them on the wall. 

“Wow, geez, it’s already eight. Hey, wanna grab a bite before we head home?” 

“Sure, but only if it isn’t pizza.” Clint pouts at Steve’s response and pokes at Natasha, willing her by the power of six years of friendship and fourteen days spent cooped up in a Gemini spacecraft to be on his side. She doesn’t seem to notice, though, instead looking around the bay almost like she’s searching for someone.

“Hawkeye, where’s Hawkeye?” she asks, referring to Clint’s accidental mentee and the only person in all of SHIELD with better sim scores than him. “I thought Thirteen Prime was up after us?” 

“Huh,” Clint says, following her gaze across the bay and searching for the purple t-shirt he vaguely remembers seeing Kate wearing that morning. “I thought so, too, and it isn’t like Katie to be late.” There’s no sign of her or her crew, and worse, Chief Astronaut James Rhodes is standing behind the bank of simulator consoles, and the chief coming down to find a crew instead of just calling them in screams bad news in flashing neon letters. Clint makes eye contact with Wanda, sitting at her console with her headset dangling from her neck, but she motions towards Rhodes - Rhodey, because the astronaut corps has decided to collectively adopt Tony Stark’s nickname for him - and gives a minute shrug. But before Clint can open his mouth to ask someone about it, Rhodey beats him to it.

“Romanoff, Barton, Rogers, a word,” he calls, and without further preamble he turns and leads the way out of the high bay. The three of them stay where they are, looking confusedly at each other. 

“Move along, astronauts, unless there’s another prime crew with the same names that I haven’t heard about,” Rhodey yells over his shoulder. Natasha shrugs and hurries after him, Clint and Steve flanking her easily.

They make small talk as they wend their way through the SHIELD building’s maze of hallways; Clint and Nat arguing about the merits of tea over coffee before joining Steve in heckling Rhodey about the sign on the door to Mission Control that reads ‘Days Since Our Last Nonsense.’ They’d come in in the morning to find the sign with a big zero written in the empty box in the unmistakable handwriting of SHIELD’s finest troublemaker, also known as Tony Stark, the first man on the moon. Rhodey doesn’t rise to the bait, though, and he never passes up an opportunity to complain-slash-brag about his husband. Clint exchanges covert glances with his crewmates, and he can tell they’re all thinking the same thing: either this is something very, very bad, or very, very good, and none of them can tell which. 

Rhodey ushers the three of them into his generously furnished office and shuts the door behind himself, going around them to sit behind his desk.

“So,” he says, dragging out the vowel. “Wanna go to the moon six months early?”

Clint gapes at him. Steve looks like he’s been hit by a large vehicle. Even Natasha looks surprised.

“I’m sorry?” someone manages eventually. Clint thinks it might’ve been him.

“Kate Bishop’s ear operation needs longer than we expected to heal up. Her crew has already agreed to fly on 14 instead of 13. If you’re willing, Fra Mauro is yours.” 

The room goes silent again. Clint looks at Natasha. Natasha looks at Steve. Steve looks at Clint.

“I’ll give you a moment. You can say no, if you want.” Rhodey turns pointedly away and starts tapping at the tablet lying on his desk, but if Clint had to guess, his face would say plainly that he knows none of them would dream of saying no.

‘Say no?” he mouths anyway. ‘Who does he think we are?’

“It  _ is _ six months of training we’re losing,” Steve says slowly, but the look on his face gives the game away. 

“You two always had the worst poker faces I’ve ever seen,” Natasha says, eyes sparkling. She looks back over at Rhodey, still absorbed in whatever he’s doing - or at least pretending very convincingly - and when she looks back the teasing look is gone from her face. She makes eye contact with first Clint, and then Steve, and when they both nod, she nods back. Rhodey swivels back around when she clears her throat, and Clint and Steve step up on either side of her as she squares her shoulders and sweeps her red hair back from her face.

“We’ll take it.” Rhodey grins.

“Good. Congratulations, Apollo 13.”

Clint can barely contain himself as Natasha leads the way out of Rhodey’s office, and the moment the door slides shut behind them, he pulls Steve into a hug and kisses Natasha on the cheek as she halfheartedly swats him away, a little smile on her face. Tomorrow, they’ll have new jumpsuits with the 13 mission patch on the shoulder, and training will nearly triple in speed, and Maroon Team’s Daisy Johnson will hand over their mission to White Team’s Nick Fury, but no amount of SHIELD bureaucracy can hold them down because today, Natasha Romanoff, Clint Barton, and Steve Rogers are going to the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i will love u forever for comments and kudos  
> on tumblr [@mariahiill](https://mariahiill.tumblr.com)


	2. uneasy lies the head

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok i swear i was gonna post this chapter a month ago and then school kicked my entire ass so here we are :') hope u enjoy though

Clint swims up out of sleep to the shrill sound of his phone ringing. He considers not answering; his hotel bed at the Cape is obscenely comfortable and he’s very warm and disinclined to move. But the ringtone is the shrieking alarm that he’s set for everyone from SHIELD HQ, and everyone who would care to call him this early in the morning probably has something important to say and will give him endless amounts of bullshit if he doesn’t pick up. He lets it ring for a second longer before groaning and reaching for it, patting around on his bedside table with his eyes still closed until the sleek phone slips into his hand.

“Aw, fuck, my eyes,” he mumbles, squinting against the bright screen to pick up the call. “Barton,” he says, idly wondering whether or not he can catch a few more hours of sleep before he has to meet Nat and Steve for lunch.

“Hi Clint, this is Dr. Berry,” the voice on the other end says.  _ Shit _ . The flight surgeon never calls anyone, ever, except maybe Fury. Clint wracks his brain for anything even mildly related to medical that would get him in enough trouble for the flight surgeon himself to be calling him at….seven in the morning, according to the clock on the table.

“What’s up, Doc?” he asks, pushing back the covers and making a beeline for the coffeemaker. At the very least he’ll be caffeinated for the undoubtedly painful conversation he’s about to endure.

“Some of your last blood tests came out inconclusive, so we’d like you to come in as soon as possible so we can run them again.” Clint groans again, not caring that Berry’s probably heard it - for everything he loves about working for SHIELD, he really, really hates their medical team, and the med bay, and pretty much the entire medical department. It isn’t exactly a well-kept secret that Clint will do almost anything to get out of medical, up to and including causing a not-insignificant amount of property damage. “It should take a few hours at the most.”

“Alright,” Clint says, not particularly bothering to disguise the annoyance in his voice. “Be there in 20.” He hangs up before Berry can reply and puts his phone down on the counter, exchanging it for the now-full coffee pot and sipping straight from the rim, heedless of the heat. When he finishes the pot he sticks it back under the drip and adds more grounds, leaving it to brew and picking his phone up to text Natasha and Steve.

> _ <<Clint, 08:01. hey, berry wants me for some more tests or smth, he says itll just be a lil so i should be able to make lunch>> _

Natasha texts back almost instantly; Clint swears she never sleeps. When they were up together on Gemini 7, she was always awake when he went to sleep and still awake when he got up. He’s still kind of surprised that their friendship survived spending 14 days in the equivalent of the front seat of a sedan, especially since she always says he was the absolute worst to live with. 

> _ <<tash, 08:02. kay, text if you can’t make it. don’t break out of medical this time.>> _
> 
> _ <<Clint, 08:03. hey, it’s not my fault they’re a bunch of sadistic assholes. u try getting stabbed and centrifuged for two hours>> _
> 
> _ <<tash, 08:05. wonder why they found that necessary.>> _
> 
> _ <<eagle boi, 08:06. you do know medical inspections exist for a reason, yes?>> _
> 
> _ <<Clint, 08:07. yeah. torture of me.>> _

They text back and forth for a little while longer until Clint finishes his coffee, leaving the carafe in the sink and going to change. He takes as long as he can reasonably spend in the shower, trying to put off his impending doom, but eventually he runs out of things to move around the hotel room. A unabashed fear of what the doctors might do to him as revenge for being late might be part of his motivation to finally get out the door too. 

Ten minutes later he’s on the interstate on the way to Launch Control, the radio in the background playing some eighties station. He flashes his SHIELD badge to the security guards and parks in front of the boxy white building, and as he locks the car he catches a glimpse over the trees at the bulk of their Saturn V on its way to the pad. He’s heard it called all manner of names by all manner of people, but since the first day it’d rolled out of the VAB in all its glory he’s known little more than that this is the rocket taking him to the moon, and he’d better treat it right.

He blows a kiss in the direction of the rocket and turns to head inside.

Natasha knows there’s something wrong when the black SHIELD SUV pulls up beside the little patch of moon-like dirt that’s been set aside for her to test the moonrock sampling drills. Her feeling of foreboding only deepens when Rhodey climbs out of the passenger seat, and through the tinted windows she catches a glimpse of someone who looks a lot like Administrator Ross. 

“Romanoff, a word,” Rhodey says, looking grim. Natasha thinks of standing in front of the simulator six months ago and hearing the same words leave his mouth, of standing shoulder to shoulder with Clint as he tells them they’ll be the first Americans to orbit the moon, of sitting in a hotel room in DC with  _ a fire on the pad _ ringing in her ears. This is bad. She knows it.

“Sir,” she says. “Administrator,” to Ross, who’s followed Rhodey out of the car.

“Commander Romanoff,” Ross says. “We have a problem.” Natasha raises an eyebrow, conscious of Rhodey standing next to her with disapproval radiating off him in waves. She doesn’t dare to break eye contact to see who it’s directed at. “Pietro Maximoff has the measles.”

“So?” she says, pointedly letting disdain trickle into her voice. “We’re vaccinated.” She can’t possibly guess why Ross is making this such a big deal; it isn’t like they spend that much time around the backup crew anyway, Besides, if they’ve been exposed, vaccines exist for a reason. The only reason she keeps listening is the way Rhodey’s shifting his weight from foot to foot, bad news written across his face. She trusts him, of all people, to look out for them, and if he looks like that then there’s something Ross isn’t saying. 

“Natasha,” Rhodey says softly. “Clint isn’t.” 

The ground falls out from under her feet.

She only dimly hears him saying, past the ringing in her ears, that they’ll discuss it further back at the SHIELD building. She follows them into the SUV, utterly numb. Maybe she’s in a bad dream; any moment now she’ll wake up in her hotel room with making it to lunch on time as her only worry. There isn’t enough feeling in her fingers to pinch herself.

Ross flashes his badge at the entrance and leads the way to his office, taking a seat behind his desk. Rhodey perches on the edge of an overstuffed armchair, and Natasha stays standing. She thinks if she sits she might explode.

“I’ve trained,” she says slowly, “for Fra Mauro.” Rhodey’s foot is tapping a staccato beat on the floor.

“Commander, you must understand,” Ross begins, fiddling with something on his desk and refusing to meet her eyes.

“We’re ready. Clint and Steve and I, we’re ready. We’re three days out from launch, you can’t seriously be considering this.” The look on Ross’s face is positively condescending, and she yearns to punch him right in that fake-earnest expression.

“Clint Barton will be getting seriously ill right when you and Rogers will be trying to rendezvous with him. We simply cannot afford the risk.”

“Natasha, we’re not saying you’re not ready,” Rhodey interjects, and she tries to soften her expression a little, because he’s just trying to do his job. She knows he’d move heaven and earth if he thought he could fix what’s happening. “That’s just a pretty awful time for a fever. Think about it. If something went wrong, because he was sick. How do you think he’d feel?”

After ten years of flying black ops missions for the Soviets and five more years flying in space for SHIELD, it isn’t particularly hard for her to call up the scenario. She can even picture it, like a movie: her and Steve drifting away, Clint making the 250,000 mile flight back to Earth alone, drowning in guilt and self-loathing. She feels herself wavering, just a little.  _ Damn you, Rhodes. _

“Three days before launch,” she repeats. “When we can read each other’s faces, the tone of each other’s voices.”

“Sam Wilson’s a fine pilot,” Ross says, like he thinks he knows how a flight crew ticks. Like that’ll make this better.

“Yes, he is,” Natasha snaps, patience fraying. “But he’s not ready. We don’t have the time.”

“Natasha,” Rhodey says. “We have two choices. Bump Clint and fly Sam, or push all three of you down the pipeline.”  _ SHIELD won’t accept the risk _ , his eyes say. Natasha yearns to tear into someone for robbing Clint of his mission, for robbing  _ them _ out of a moon landing together, of being more concerned about covering their own asses than they are about her crew and her mission. But she’s pretty sure that Rhodey and Ross have argued already, even before they’d brought the matter to her. The fact that she’s standing here right now means that the chief astronaut, however unhappy about the decision he is, at least thinks that it isn’t putting anyone in danger. 

She still wants to punch Ross a little. 

“We’ll take Wilson,” she says eventually, voice miraculously steady. “But if Clint Barton doesn’t get a mission, you’ll have me to answer to.” Rhodey nods instantly.

“Done.” Natasha lets the corner of her mouth twitch up in the barest hint of a smile.

“Thank you, Commander,” Ross says. “If you would pass on our decision to Barton.”  _ Like you had anything to do with it _ , she thinks, but she nods sharply and spins on her heel to stalk out of his office. The door clicks shut behind her, and she’s faced with the reality that she’s somehow supposed to tell her best friend that she isn’t taking him to the moon. 

She walks to the end of the corridor and stops, of half a mind to turn right back around and give Ross a piece of her mind, but before she can do it Rhodey appears around the corner, apology written all over his face.

“Natasha, I’m so sorry,” he says. “I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen, the asshole. Just brushed me right off and made me go find you.”

“Careful, Rhodey, you never know which walls have ears,” Natasha jokes weakly. Rhodey’s lips quirk.

“Oh, I want him to hear this one.” Natasha raises an imaginary glass in a salute.

“Gotta love those flight surgeons.” Rhodey nods along with her comment, face going rueful. There’s years of bitterness in that look; everyone at Mission Control knows the story of how James Rhodes was grounded for a heart problem all the way back during Mercury and refused to let himself turn into  _ that _ astronaut, the astronaut who never amounted to anything, by making himself the corps’ biggest advocate. Natasha can only guess at the guilt he must be feeling, that even though Clint has the chance to fly again he still has to go through losing six months of work in one fell swoop, and Rhodey couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening.

“It isn’t your fault, you know,” she says as they start their way down the corridor again, aiming for reassuring but likely missing by a mile. “SHIELD brass is just doing what they do best: obfuscation in the name of self-preservation.” He smiles and pats her on the shoulder, but his grin is too brittle and it doesn’t reach his eyes. 

“You want me to come with you to tell Clint and Steve?” he asks, blatantly changing the subject. She shakes her head. 

“They need to hear it from me. I think they’ll take it better.” 

“Alright, well, call me if you need anything. I’ll send out sim schedules as soon as I get back.” Natasha nods and pulls her phone out of the pocket of her flight blues, already dreading the conversation she’s about to have.

“Sounds good. Thanks, Rhodey.” They part ways at the door, Rhodey heading deeper into the building towards his office and Natasha going out into the parking lot, texting the crew group chat as she goes.

> _ <<Natasha, 11:44. Change of plans, can you meet me in the VAB in 15? Ground floor conference area.>> _

She selects a sleek black sedan from the SHIELD motor pool, entering her authorization code and her fingerprint to unlock the biometric starters. Her phone fits neatly in the cupholder, and she leaves the ringer on as she navigates out of the garage and onto the main road. The drive from the administrative building to the VAB is supposed to take ten minutes, but Natasha makes it in five - Clint always tells her that she’s an awful driver, but she knows he loves the adrenaline rush as much as she does, and he’s just complaining to mess with her. 

Her phone pings as she pulls into the parking lot, and she leaves the engine running as she picks it up.

> _ <<mcdumbass, 11:49. omw, smth wrong? (r we still gettin food or nah?)>> Natasha lets out a bitter laugh, whether from the pure irony of the whole thing or from the fact that Clint’s first thought is still food, she doesn’t know. _
> 
> _ <<fossil, 11:50. I can pick something up on the way if we want?>> _
> 
> _ <<Natasha, 11:51. You’re good, we can go get something later if you two feel like it.>> Somehow, she doesn’t think any of them, even Clint with his bottomless stomach, are going to be much in the way of hungry after this conversation. _
> 
> _ <<mcdumbass, 11:53. aww, nat, no :(>> _

A little grin makes its way onto her face at the pure Clint-ness of his response, but it soon fades when she remembers why she’s here. She sits in the car for a little while longer, wondering whether she should’ve taken Rhodey up on his offer to come with her. The idea of having someone else with her to blunt the impact of the news sounds awfully attractive right about now. 

Seconds later, though, she shakes her head to dismiss the notion. She’s spent years dealing with sideways glances from people who think that she, Natasha Romanoff, former Soviet pilot, former spy, woman, doesn’t deserve to even be part of SHIELD, much less command a mission, much less land on the moon. She isn’t about to prove them right, shirk her duties because she’s too chicken to deliver a little bit of bad news. Even if it’s to the best friend she’s ever had.

Eventually, she shuts the engine off and climbs out of the car, locking the doors and heading into the building. The conference area is mercifully deserted, and she drags three of the beat-up spinning chairs over into an empty space and arranges them in a rough triangle before plopping into one of them and kicking her boots up on another. She goes through five increasingly awkward versions of  _ ‘Hey, Clint, Ross is kicking you off the mission because he thinks you’re sick’ _ before the big doors swing open and Clint himself saunters in, a leather jacket hanging halfway off his shoulder. 

“Hey, Nat,” he says, throwing himself into the chair not occupied by her feet and grinning rakishly at her. She grins back, kicks gently at his feet when he tries to put them on top of hers, but she can’t stop imagining the look Clint gets, the one that looks like someone’s kicked his dog, thinking about Rhodey apologizing, so soft like he thinks she’s going to fall to pieces, and their usual banter falls flat. She feels like she’s just pretending, following the script the Council has written her, a puppet with  _ Commander _ stitched onto her jumpsuit, and she wonders whether she should’ve taken option B. Maybe she should’ve pushed all three of them back and let their backup crew fly instead, just to keep her crew together. They’re hers, and she’s theirs, and she’s made the call that tore it all apart. 

Evidently, she’s gone silent for far too long, because when she looks up Clint is leaning over in his chair, cheek propped in his hand and eyes fixed on her.

“Something wrong?” he asks, and he looks so open and earnest that her heart twists, and she wishes she could turn back time, barge into Ross’s office early in the morning and interrupt his argument with Rhodey, fight for her life now that she knows there’s something to be fighting for.

“Let’s wait for Steve to get here,” she says, trying to make her face as blank as she can get it. There’s something in her voice, though, something breaking through her facade, that has him sitting up so he can look properly at her.

“So it’s bad,” he says, and sometimes she hates how well they can read each other’s microexpressions. As useful as it is to know exactly what someone else is thinking at all times, she knows she’s never been able to hide a single thing from him. She swears softly in Russian and nods, figuring that she has no way out. Lying to Clint Barton, sugarcoating the truth, is the fastest way to earn a spot on his shit list, and she’s not about to break one of the few absolute rules of their friendship. Clint is halfway through opening his mouth when the doors swing open again to reveal Steve, a set of old-fashioned car keys dangling from his hand. 

“Steve!” Clint says, but there’s a little cloud of anxiousness in his eyes. “C’mon, sit down, Nat’s got something to say.” Natasha really wishes he hadn’t said that. She swings her feet off the chair and motions Steve towards it, rolling her eyes a little when he pauses to dust it off before he sits down and tucks his keys away into a pocket.

“Commander?” he asks, one eyebrow twitching upwards. Natasha sighs and folds her hands in her lap. 

“Clint,” she starts, then pauses, shakes her head. “Ross and Rhodey just came to talk to me.”  _ Dammit, Romanoff, spit it out. _

“Nat? You alright?” Clint looks concerned.

“I’m fine.” Her voice sounds brittle and distant even to her own ears, and then the whole thing is spilling out of her in a rush. “Pietro Maximoff has the measles. We’ve all been exposed, and Ross is bumping you off the flight because the flight surgeons and the council are covering their own asses and they think you’re going to get sick up there.”

Dead silence. Steve is staring at her like she’s speaking ancient Greek. Ross’s voice echoes in her ears:  _ Commander, you must understand _ , and she lifts her chin a little higher.

Clint’s eye twitches. 

“What...the fuck?” he says, delivery so perfectly flat that Natasha inexplicably wants to laugh. 

“That sums it up.” His eye twitches again, and then suddenly he slumps back into his chair like the air’s been let out of him.

“Damn. I sorta suspected something this morning, Berry kept stabbing me a little too hard whenever he put the needles in and everyone looked all twitchy every time I asked questions. I thought he was just getting one over on me ‘cause I didn’t show up for my last physical, but - damn.” He goes quiet, staring down at his feet, leaving the humming aircon the only sound in the room.

“I’m sorry,” he says eventually, rubbing at the back of his neck awkwardly. Natasha stares at him. 

“You’re sorry? Clint Barton, if you say that again I’ll kick your ass myself. This isn’t your fault.” Clint smiles bitterly. 

“I never got vaccinated ‘cause none of my foster homes could ever afford something like that, and somehow when I made it into the service it just never happened. And now here I am, losing our fucking  _ moon landing _ , like, I know it’s SHIELD’s ass if I get sick but Jesus…”

“Don’t apologize for something that isn’t in your control,” Steve says quietly. 

“Like, look, I can fly that CSM with one hand tied behind my back and they think getting sick’s gonna stop me? What do they think I’m gonna do, leave you guys behind? Who the hell do they think I am?” He shakes his head in disgust and sighs.

“I know, Clint. I’m sorry.” 

“So Wilson’s CSM pilot now?” Steve asks as the silence stretches out. Natasha nods, then glances at the clock on the wall and does a little mental math. They’re down to less than 72 hours left until liftoff.

Clint catches the direction of her gaze and smiles wanly. “He’ll be ready. He’s a good pilot. You’ll like him.”

“He’s not you,” Natasha says before she can stop herself. 

“Aw, Nat, I knew you cared,” Clint says, but he sounds tired and tense and nowhere near his go-lucky self, and no matter how hard she tries, she can’t get her mouth to form the reassuring smile she wants. Out of the corner of her eye, Steve is tapping his chin and looking pensive.

“Look, guys, why don’t we go talk to Rhodey, figure something out?” Clint nods, a little bit of wobbly hope coming back into his eyes, and Natasha curses to herself in as many languages as she knows how. 

“It won’t do any good,” she says, hating every word as it leaves her mouth. “Rhodey fought it, he did, but Ross was, well, very Ross about the whole thing. I had to make a call.” 

“Hell of a call,” Clint says, and all of a sudden there’s a hard edge to his voice.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, feeling very small and inadequate. “Do you want to get something to eat? We can go to that pizza place you like-”

“I’m gonna pass. Not really hungry, you know.” And then he’s scooping up his jacket and walking away, shoulders drooping. Natasha feels like she’s been kicked in the stomach.

“Let him go,” Steve says, hand on her shoulder as she makes to chase after him. “Just, give him some time. I think he needs to be alone. Go talk to him later. He’ll want to see you.” She glances up just in time to see the doors slam behind Clint’s retreating back, and she wants to snap at him that he has no idea how she and Clint work, that  _ she _ should know when he needs space and when he needs her. But everything’s gone topsy-turvy around her in the space of less than two hours and as she thinks about it, maybe he’s right. Maybe  _ she  _ needs time to process, too, before she goes dumping her issues onto him.

“Trust me, Natasha,” he says. “Leave him be.”

And she does trust him, would trust him with her life, and she’s about to put it in his hands in less than a week when they land on the moon. So she nods at him and accepts when he asks if she wants to go to lunch anyway, and she’ll admit to herself that she has fun stealing the pepperoni off his pizza and swatting him when he tries to steal her mushrooms in revenge, and by the time they head back to the VAB for the new sims they’ve been assigned she feels at least marginally better.

Hours later, tired and sore from being cooped up in a simulator all afternoon, she’s walking back to the parking lot to pick up her car when a jet fighter zooms by overhead. She glances up just in time to see it waggle its wings in a complicated pattern as it banks around towards the east and loops around in the rough shape of a delta. She makes the delta symbol in return, arms over her head, and she’s rewarded when Clint tips his wings right and then left again before flying off in the direction of the airfield. Apparently, she’s forgiven. 

She stares up at the sky until the twin contrails evaporate, and when she starts walking again, it’s with a little smile on her face and a finger pressed to the delta tattoo on her collarbone.


	3. reach up and rise again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> . uh i edited this chapter to Death and i'm actually kinda proud of it so here y'all go enjoy!!

_“Wilson.”_

_“Sam? Hi, this is James Rhodes.”_

_“Rhodey, hey, man, what’s up?”_

_“You want the good news or the bad news first?”_

_“Uh.”_

_“Good it is. You’re headed to the moon. Bad news: you have three days to be ready.”_

_“Wait, what?”_

_“Barton’s gotten exposed to the measles and we’re concerned about him getting sick. We’ve had to remove him from the flight. I know that you know SOP in this situation is to call in the backup crew.”_

_“Yes, sir.”_

_“Crew’s expecting you at the Cape; I’ve sent out sim schedules that should be in your inbox right about now.”_

_“Mm-hm, I understand.”_

_“Wheels up in 15 at Edwards. Congratulations, Sam.”_

_“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”_

 

* * *

 

Clint breaks into a dead run when he hears the heavy doors of the VAB slam shut behind him. The security guard at the door glances sharply at him as he sprints through the atrium and bursts out into the parking lot, chest heaving like he’s run for miles. The sunlight is painfully bright after the dim lights of the high bay, but he doesn’t wait for however long his eyes need to adjust before he’s stumbling out into the lot and fumbling his way to his car, eventually collapsing against the hood, chest clenching painfully when he sees the Saturn jutting out against the formless blue horizon. He can hardly believe that a few short hours ago, that rocket was going to be his ticket into the history books, all the time he’d spent sneaking glances up at the sky and wondering what it might feel like to be a star come to life. 

Right up until it all came crumbling down around his ears.

He wrenches the car door open and throws himself into the driver’s seat, swinging out of his parking space with a squeal of tires. There’s tears pricking uncomfortably at the edges of his eyes, and the part of him still clinging to its ability of rational thought _hates_ it, hates that he’s falling apart right here in the midst of everything, hates that his default response is to run. 

Natasha’s soft, horribly pitying expression swims to the surface of his mind, and his hands spasm on the wheel as he fights to keep what’s left of his composure. She’s always had little tics that she pretends not to have and he pretends not to notice, but he also knows perfectly well that she can sit as still as death with voice completely deadpan after accidentally resetting the entire computer system and leaving her half a million miles away from Earth with a spacecraft thinking it was sitting on the launchpad. He’d caught one look at her face right when he’d come in, and in the split second before her impeccable mask came sliding over it her expression looked raw, flayed open in a way that honestly _terrified_ him. He thought he was about to go insane watching her fiddling with the hem of her jumpsuit and sneaking glances at the door even while she teased him like everything was normal and fine and not spinning out of control.

But nothing is normal and nothing is fine and everything _is_ spinning out of control and honestly, he feels a little like he’s losing his mind. 

He floors the gas, fingers tapping out an insistent beat against the wheel in lieu of the feeling that he really, really wants to punch something. He’d like to see a cop try and stop him.

The big boxy shape of the Canaveral Air Force base hangar comes into view a few minutes later, and the hairpin turn he takes onto the entrance road has the added bonus of putting the mocking sight of the launch complex out of his eyeline. The thunder-rumble of jets taking off vibrates through the frame of the car in the next second, and however involuntarily he feels some of the tension tightening his body drain away.

Clint fell in love with the sky way back when his brother snuck their father’s old crop duster out of the shed and flew them in lazy circles around the farm for the best twenty minutes of his young life. And years later, with his father gone and his mother dead and his brother god-knows-where doing god-knows-what, a scrawny, sarcastic, jaded-at-seventeen Clint Barton finds that one thing, at least, hasn’t lost its luster. 

From that moment on, every time he hits a dead end, every time he finds himself with nowhere to go and no one to fall back on, he climbs into whatever plane that’s in his possession, and a few that aren’t, and outflies his own worries. Some of his greatest hits are his weird neighbour’s old Cessna when he got himself tangled up with the mafia by accident, a beautiful Sabre he commandeered when he was thinking about quitting the Air Force, an honest-to-god biplane in the shitty months he spent divorced and unemployed until the brass ring of the moon caught the world by storm. 

He double-parks the car in the far corner of the lot and lets himself sink into the well-worn paths of habit, striding into the hangar and making a beeline for his gleaming T-38 sitting behind a partition in the back corner. The mechanic working on the plane next to it glances up and gives him a friendly wave, and Clint pulls himself out of his own headspace long enough to wave back as he starts running through his preflight checks in his head. Tire pressure. Fuel gauge. Transmitter. Flaps. Everything checks out perfectly. One thing, at least, remains untouched by the hurricane currently upending his life.

He waves over a tug driver and walks behind the plane as it’s wheeled out onto the tarmac, and when he settles into his seat and tugs the canopy shut, one more misaligned thing clicks into place and he finds that his hands are steady as ever as they settle onto the controls.

“Canaveral Base, this is Three Seven Delta, ready to taxi, east departure,” he radios to the tower.

“Three Seven Delta, cleared for taxi on runway five,” comes the response. He confirms and starts the plane on a looping circuit of the airfield, staying well out of any paths that might put the launch complex in his eyeline. 

Runway five is being vacated by an exuberant Carol Danvers as he lines up with the holding patterns on the tarmac, and he musters the energy to raise two fingers in a salute as she taxis past. 

“Canaveral Base, Three Seven Delta ready for takeoff, runway five.” A rush of static crackles over the comm line to precede the tower’s reply.

“Three Seven Delta, winds two eight three at thirteen, cleared for takeoff.” Clint can’t stop a grin from ghosting across his face at the familiar words, the jet thrumming under his fingers. The rumble of the turbo-powered engines blocks out everything else around him, and when the plane lifts into the air at the end of the runway he feels almost human again. 

Clint flies every solo routine that he remembers from his barnstorming days, pouring every last bit of righteous anger and injustice and plain old insult into the flips and rolls and hairpin turns until his fingers go numb and he feels slightly less like he wants to burn the world to the ground. The hot rush of vindictiveness he gets when he buzzes the admin building not once, not twice, but three times makes him not care a whit about the inevitable dressing-down from whatever annoyed paper-pusher who decides to be enough of an asshole to report it. 

At one point he pushes his jet to its limits, flying as high and as fast as he can take it, and in the crushing g-forces he almost fancies he can see Houston peeking over the curve of the earth at him. In that split second, hovering high above the clouds with miles of atmosphere still above him he’s struck with the desire to punch his afterburners, shatter a couple windows and get out of Florida as fast as he can. He could go home and sit on his couch with his dog and order a pizza and get very drunk and forget all about the fact that he was supposed to go to the moon the day after tomorrow. 

But as soon as the urge comes it passes. In the split second before he’d hightailed it out of the echoey VAB, he’d caught a glimpse of the stricken look on Natasha’s face, and as he spirals back down to 20,000 feet the pressure in his chest doesn’t ease a single bit. If this whole shitshow is anyone’s fault, it’s his, because he'd let so many things fall into the cracks between jumping from town to town and family to family and hadn’t ever paused to think about where it’d get him. It’s his own goddamned past that he’s spent all this time running from, and his own goddamned past that’d gotten them all into this mess. He can’t leave Nat, on the brink of her very own ten days of glory, the culmination of her career as an astronaut, thinking she’s responsible. God knows he’s fucked it up enough for one day, running out of there like a coward. She’s probably blaming herself already, and he isn’t going to make it any worse than he already has.

As he turns his plane towards the airfield, he catches a glimpse of a shock of red hair far below, and almost before he knows he’s doing it he’s tilting the nose up and sketching the delta from their Gemini days across the sky. A broad grin splits his face when she returns the signal, and he touches down on the runway feeling slightly more optimistic. Him and Nat can work it out. They always do.

That view, along with his adrenaline rush, holds just as long as it takes Clint to taxi back to the hangar, leave his plane in chief mechanic Mack’s hands, and make it down Highway 1 and through the door of his hotel room. The crushing despair of a couple hours ago seems to have drained away, leaving him feeling worn and empty and in the mood to do nothing besides sleep for days. 

He does suspect that the true magnitude of the situation hasn’t hit him yet, and looking at what happened this afternoon, it’ll be a hell of a show when it does. 

He fumbles his keycard a couple times trying to get inside, and when the door finally unlocks he stands in the front room - because another perk of being prime crew is the best hotel rooms money can buy - and stares blankly at the bed for a full thirty seconds.

All he really wants to do is throw himself into the obscenely soft sheets and not think about the past 24 hours and sleep until someone inevitably evicts him because he isn’t technically on the prime crew anymore. He does muster up the energy to stumble over to the computer and pull up the crew sim schedules, thanking the first god that pops into his head that no one’s bothered to take away his clearance yet. 

Natasha gets out of her last sim at around seven, and he would put good money on here being the first place she comes afterwards. It’s nearly four, now, which means at least three hours of sleep. It’s going to have to be good enough.

Clint hopes she’s bringing booze.

That taken care of, Clint practically falls into the bed that’s been calling his name since he stepped into the room. He gives up on taking off his pants when they somehow end up caught on his feet, and scrambles under the covers with clothes still on. He’s out like a light within seconds.

 

* * *

 

Clint wakes up an indeterminate amount of time later to a sharp knocking on his door. He gets himself tangled up in the blankets as he climbs out of bed, and nearly trips over his own pants when he manages to extricate himself. Eventually he sets everything to rights, places his phone back on the table where he’d knocked it off when he’d woken up, and hurries over to the door. He blinks blearily in the light from the hallway, rubbing the last of the sleep out of his eyes to find Natasha standing on the other side in sweatpants and what looks like one of Clint’s old hoodies with a bottle of expensive-looking something under her arm. 

“Was wondering when you were going to wake up,” she says, slipping past him into the room and turning on some lights. He hears some glasses clinking, and wonders vaguely where she’d produced them from.

“Yes, hello to you too, Nat,” Clint says to the empty doorway. “Won’t you come in?”

“Shut up and take your drink,” she replies, appearing suddenly behind him with a tumbler half-full of amber liquid. He’ll forever deny jumping at her crazy ninja skills, but he takes the glass from her and leads her over to the adjoining room, sitting down on one end of the couch and propping his feet up on the glass-topped coffee table. She curls up next to him, kicking off her boots and tucking her feet under herself, and gives him a long look before turning her attention to pouring herself a measure of what smells like very good scotch.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, sipping from their drinks, and Clint can almost pretend that they’re just unwinding after a long day of sims, enjoying each other’s company, if not for the subtle tension in the lines of her body and the way she’s tracing the ridges of her glass with a finger between drinks. 

“Nat?” he asks. The silence stretches a moment further, like taffy on a hot day, and then snaps open. She looks up from where she’s examining the reflections from the diamond-shaped pattern on the side of her glass, and from this distance her green eyes are clouded. 

“Clint,” she says. Pauses. Takes a drink. 

“I’m sor-” she begins, at the same time that Clint says, “Don’t you dare apologize.”

They stare at each other for another second, right back in the impasse they started in. And then Nat’s mouth twitches up a tiny bit, and then suddenly they’re both laughing, that strange watery-sounding laugh that lives somewhere between laughing and crying. The moment he tries to stifle the chuckles he quickly finds that he can't stop, all the pent-up emotions of the afternoon spilling out in the only way he has left. 

Just when Clint’s starting to calm down, some of the liquid in Natasha’s glass sloshes over the side and onto the couch and he breaks out in a fresh spate of giggles, which sets her off again too. They really aren’t drunk enough for this to be _this_ funny, but the tension that’s been hanging stiflingly between them ever since he’d gotten her first text is receding more by the minute. 

It takes a full five minutes for the snickering to subside, and by then there’s probably more alcohol outside of the glasses than there is in. Eventually Clint pours them more scotch and they settle back in, Natasha losing all of her tense stiffness and slumping against his shoulder, her hair soft where it touches his cheek. 

“I-”

“Don’t say it,” he interrupts, and she glares halfheartedly at him. 

“-am not going to say sorry, Clinton, lay off. What I was _going_ to say was, I need you to know that none of this is your fault. It’s a shitty situation that happened at the worst possible time, but you had nothing to do with it.”

“But, Nat.” It’s her turn to interrupt, now.

“No buts. Steve agrees with me, you know, and you wouldn’t say no to his puppy eyes. Look-” Her voice turns serious, compelling him to look over and meet her eyes even though he’s terrified of what he’ll find there. “I talked to Rhodey, okay?” she continues, something vengeful sparking in her gaze, and suddenly he’s terrified for a whole other reason. “You’re going to get a mission, and if you don’t, someone will answer to me.”

Clint doesn’t answer right away, instead taking another drink to avoid opening his mouth. Yes, he wants a mission. More than anything. But he wants to be with Natasha, and Steve, and he wants to fly support for _them_ , not anyone else. He wants to see Steve look scandalized and Nat look annoyed when he flirts outrageously with whichever poor soul happens to be Capcom, and have them in the seats beside him when he leaves the earth for the second time, and hear their voices radio back from the surface of the moon. He wants their names together in the history books, not with him as the poor footnote to their otherwise flawless mission. It’s going to be flawless either way, whether or not he’s manning the center seat, but somehow that doesn’t ease the hurt at all.

“It won’t be with you,” he says eventually, voice quiet, something nameless aching deep inside of him. Nat’s face twists, and she closes her eyes for a brief second. 

“No,” she agrees, just as soft. “It won’t. I’ll bully Fury into letting me capcom for you, though. You’ll get positively sick of me in your ear.” Her attempt at humour just makes that thing in Clint’s chest twist a little bit more, and he can do little more than put an arm around her, rub a hand across the tight lines of her shoulders and hope that it’s enough.

“I could never. I could never get sick of you, Tasha.” And then that something is cracking wide open and he’s choking back a sob, setting his glass down to wipe at his eyes, everything suddenly tumbling down over him. 

But Natasha, wonderful, wonderful Natasha, his oldest friend, for a while his _only_ friend, knows exactly what he needs. She shifts to get her legs out from under her, careful not to break their contact, and pulls him into a crushing hug. He twists his hands into the fabric of her hoodie, lets himself shake against her shoulder, and a couple of the tears he’s been holding back all day finally escape him. 

“Oh, Clint,” she whispers, pulling him further in until it hurts to breathe, until all he can feel are her arms around him, grounding him like she’s afraid he’ll float away. “Just let it out.” Somewhere past the edges of his awareness, he registers that she’s shaking almost as much as he is, and something about that is freeing to him, enough that it allows him to finally let go of his fraying hold on his composure. 

She holds him through it, through the hiccoughing sobs and the tremors as his body fights to remember it knows how to breathe through the pain, holds him until they subside into half-incoherent curses and mutters her own invective at Ross and the Council and the government and thrice-damned infectious diseases, and when he finally lapses into silence she gets up and wordlessly tops up his drink. He tosses it back, glad for the burn to rival his still-burning eyes, and puts the glass back on the table, goes to the bathroom to splash water on his face and when he comes back he pretends not to notice the crumpled tissue on the floor by her feet. 

“You’re going to be amazing, Tash,” he says, and means it. She manages a shaky smile and hugs him tight one more time, before letting go and downing her own drink. “Come on, now, tell me about Wilson. Is he gonna be on my level someday?”

“He could never.” A wan smirk ghosts across her face. “He's good, though. Really good, actually. He even got that reentry sim, that one with the false cutoff light? Second try. Even you didn't get it the first time. I mean, it's his first time back in the cockpit for months. I’d say he did pretty well.” 

“More than a one-trick pony, then?” Clint asks, and he can’t stop the bitterness from colouring his tone. He knows he's being a bit unfair, but this is his replacement and he's allowed to be a little skeptical. Natasha's glare speaks otherwise. 

“He isn't you, but he's good,” she says, her commander-voice firmly in place. Her eyes have only the slightest tinge of apprehension, and Clint knows that that's the best he's going to get out of her tonight. “We've got two more days of sims, we'll be fine. I'd be more concerned about Steve's dignity surviving the next two weeks.” Clint's head is still pounding a little from a combination of the liquour and his little breakdown, but that doesn't stop a surprised laugh from escaping his mouth. 

“What's he gotten himself into now?” Natasha giggles even as she wipes surreptitiously at her eyes again. 

“Nothing, he just has a frankly embarrassing crush on Wilson. God, I wish you could've seen his face when he walked in - heart eyes all over the place. I think I threw up a little.” 

“You're kidding, right?” Clint says. She shakes her head. 

“Serious. And I'm pretty sure Wilson is into him, too. Wanna bet on how much angst it takes for them to figure themselves out?” He shakes his head vehemently. He's been at SHIELD long enough to know which bets to take and which ones to run away from screaming, and Nat always loves taking his money. 

“Not in a million years. You know what Steve's like. Best LM pilot out there but couldn't recognize a crush if it smacked him in the face.” Natasha's face abruptly sobers. 

“He didn't realize he was in love with Barnes until it was too late. I'd be cautious, too, in our line of work.” She, of course, is talking about Bucky Barnes, killed along with his commander and CSM pilot in the Apollo 1 fire. SHIELD’s worst scandal since the beginning of the agency. 

The room goes quiet for a second, as if the ghosts of the Apollo 1 astronauts are hovering over them. 

Clint pours half a finger of scotch into their abandoned glasses, and they make a silent toast. _Come back safe, Natasha. Please._

When the alcohol is gone, she takes his glass from him and pulls herself off the couch, the two tumblers vanishing mysteriously into her clothes. 

“Goodnight, Clint,” she says. offering him a hand to pull himself up. He knows she means _I'm sorry, thank you, I wish I could stay._

“Night, Tasha.” _Thank_ you _, don't worry about me, be safe._ He hands her the bottle and pulls her into another hug. 

“Bring me back a moon rock,” he says, and the brightness of her grin could rival the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments and kudos r my Lifeblood  
> on tumblr [@mariahiill](https://mariahiill.tumblr.com)


	4. i'll make this feel like home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's that time again yall :) enjoy

Clint flies back to Houston as soon as his hangover dissipates enough that he can stand, feeling worn-out to the bone and more drained than he’s ever been. He’s got no reason to stay any longer, and frankly he’s had quite enough of the Cape, thousand-thread count sheets or no. He only vaguely remembers driving home from Edwards; with his luck the way it’s been lately, he’s surprised he isn’t in the midst of a five-car pileup or something. 

He does run a red light.

It’s one in the morning by the time he stumbles through his front door, out of his flight suit, and into bed. He wakes up sometime later to his dog licking his face and Kate Bishop’s low chuckle from somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen. 

“What’s the time?” he mumbles, not bothering to open his eyes as he buries one hand in Lucky’s fur.

“Like, afternoon-ish, Tuesday,” Kate replies. She doesn’t sound surprised to find him at home, or at least she’s doing an impressive job of hiding it - SHIELD grapevine one, Clint zero. Steve and Tasha and Wilson are probably up to their necks in drills down at the Cape, and Clint’s heart aches for a long moment. He wants to be there, in his ship with his crew by his side. 

Lucky whines and nudges at Clint’s chest, clearly dissatisfied with the lack of attention. 

“Sorry, bud,” Clint says, rubbing his hand against Lucky’s back. Kate comes in a little later with a cup of coffee, and because she’s an awful person, makes him drag himself out of bed and put on pants before she lets him have it. 

When he’s downed the cup and wanders into the kitchen for another, he finds that she’s made eggs, also known as the only food item she can make without setting something on fire. They sit kitty-corner on the marble-topped island and throw pinches of salt at each other and Kate catches Clint up on the Mission Control gossip - apparently, Tony planted a glitter bomb in Fury’s office and he showed up to shift covered in pink sparkles.

After Clint’s done laughing his ass off at the mental image of the flight director’s black-leather ensemble adorned with craft-store glitter, Kate does a lot of extremely unsubtle winking as she mentions the ‘really badass thing that Coulson did the other day,’ and it’ll take a lot for Clint to admit he blushes. He is _not_ in love with Phil Coulson, Katherine, thank you very much. He just thinks he’s stunning in a suit and his competence is insanely hot and he kind of wants to watch TV with him and cook for him and introduce him to his dog and okay, yeah, he has a crush, and likes to dream about doing ridiculously domestic things with said crush. Whatever. 

And of course, because the universe and Jasper Sitwell are conspiring against him, he _does_ get to roll his eyes at Coulson’s shitty taste in TV and make dinner for him and watch him play with Lucky, because Nat is friends with Jasper and therefore Jasper is friends with Clint and Jasper just happens to be Coulson’s best friend, and all of it means that Clint ends up with the object of his affections in his living room every couple weeks. 

Kate is laughing at him. 

“Kids these days. No respect,” he grumbles, throwing more salt at her. She just grins and hops off the counter to pour a glass of orange juice, leaving him to stew and wonder whether Coulson’s heard about his grounding yet. 

“You know, the _Post_ did a column on the number of references to the number thirteen they could find on the flight,” she says when her glass is empty, all fake nonchalance as she leans back on one of the barstools so she can look upside-down at him. For his part, Clint's just glad they’ve stopped talking about Coulson, because that means he can stop thinking about him and his very nice ass.

“Dunno, Katie-Kate, ya know I’m not big into that superstitious stuff. Not sure if there’s any bad luck left for the rest of the crew anyway,” he replies, taking her glass and dropping it into the soapsuds in the sink. He can just barely see the offending article in the newspaper sitting unfolded on top of the pile of unopened mail cluttering the counter, right above an unfinished sudoku in Kate’s handwriting.

“Yeah, cause you took it all with you?” There’s an undercurrent of concern beneath her flippant tone, but he chooses to ignore it. He’s had his heart-to-heart with Natasha, along with the requisite number of mental breakdowns that go along with losing his crew and his mission and everything he's spent more than five years working towards all in one fell swoop. No matter how much he loves Katie, she’s approximately twelve years old and shows no respect anyway. He’s not exactly planning on spilling all his complicated issues out to her, at least not right now.

“It was yours first,” he retorts, flicking water off his fingertips and nailing her square on the nose with the cold droplets. She retaliates with a well-aimed elbow to the ribs, and it quickly devolves into a brief playfight that ends with him flat on his back on the tile floor with Lucky licking his face. Traitor.

Kate laughs and taps him on the forehead before offering him a hand, which he uses to pull himself back to his feet. There’s something cloudy in her expression, though, the same look she gets when she’s deciding whether or not she should say what she’s thinking. In Clint’s experience, she does end up saying whatever it is, and from there on it’s basically fifty-fifty on how it turns out.

He wonders whether he’s opening a can of worms here, but he figures that the can would open itself anyway, and then he’d have worms all over the floor and he'd be stuck cleaning it up.

Okay. Bad analogy.

Surprisingly enough, though, she beats him to it, putting her orange juice down on the countertop and turning to face him.

“I’m not going to ask you if you’re alright, cause frankly, this shit kinda sucks.” Right. Clint always forgets that she’s done this before, had this happen to her not once but twice.

He really needs to stop thinking of her as a teenager. 

“Look, if you find yourself going stir-crazy,” she continues after a pause, “go outside. Go flying, go driving. Turn off the news. I know half the networks aren’t even carrying the broadcasts - god, that’s so stupid. Hello? We’re going to the fucking moon over here, okay, your reality TV has nothing on us. Anyway, yeah, it still sucks to see it, so just don’t. Call me, call Jasper, maybe even pluck up the courage to finally ask Coulson out.” Clint glares at her, but he does have to admit that she might have a point. He _is_ stuck in Houston for an indefinite amount of time…but that’s a very dangerous train of thought that he is not going to pursue because he’s depressed enough as it is.

“Whatever, Katie. You had me up until the last bit.” She glares right back, but there’s a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth.

“I’ll cut you some slack this time, but don’t think you won’t be hearing about this again. You know what they say - when in Houston...” 

“That’s not even how the saying goes!” Clint exclaims, throwing his hands up and trying to ignore the way his face feels like it’s on fire.

“Prove it.” Clint gives her his trademark cocky grin and snatches her phone from the island before she can stop him. 

“Promise you’ll do it, though?” she says softly, watching him type. He glances up and finds her looking at him, concern warring with amusement on her face.

“Promise. See, look, it’s ‘when in Rome!’” 

Kate stays for a little while longer before she has to leave for some kind of dinner shindig. After she’s gone, Clint briefly considers heading over to Mission Control - the MCC, everyone calls it, because SHIELD does love their acronyms - to bother whoever’s on console. He vaguely remembers Fury’s White Team having the evening rotation, but honestly, the flight directors swap shifts so often that the schedule is actually the exception to the norm.

Even though he finds it hilarious to watch Fury try and keep a straight face while Clint flirts outrageously with Coulson on the controllers’ loop that he isn’t supposed to have access to, he eventually decides against it. And he is definitely _not_ thinking about what Kate suggested, thank you very much. He just can’t really stomach the idea of being surrounded by the side-eyes and the unspoken questions, of being the one bringing the elephant into whatever room he walks into. He knows himself just well enough to realize that even though he's putting on his mask, putting on the image that everything is okay, he's still dangerously close to falling to pieces all over again. 

He’ll go over some other day, if only because Jasper’s going to find out he’s been grounded sooner or later and he kind of wants to hear about all the sordid stories the grapevine’s inevitably cooked up in his absence.

Instead, he sits on the couch and orders Thai and watches a couple of episodes of Dog Cops that he’d left on his DVR, studiously avoiding the news. He ends up falling asleep on the couch and being reminded painfully the next morning why that kind of thing really isn't a good idea. Typical. 

Somewhere down at the Cape, he knows Nat and Steve and Wilson are holding one final press conference before they go into quarantine. Out of some self-flagellating impulse he briefly considers trying to watch it, but when he picks up the remote he finds a swell of emotion choking his throat, and he drops it like it’s burned him, staring down at where it falls onto the couch cushions and somehow not seeing it at all. Lucky’s still asleep in his bed in the corner of the living room, and with only his snuffling breaths to break the silence the house feels too big and empty around him. All of it is just a reminder of how it’s the first time he’s been alone since the news, not counting those half-awake moments scattered in between. The whole thing feels like something that happened to someone else in some other life. It’s someone else standing in his living room with two fingers hooked over the collar of his sweatshirt, staring at where the morning sun filters in through the plants on his windowsill to form odd golden shapes on the floor, someone else who’d cried in Natasha’s arms in a hotel room in Florida, someone else who’d been drinking orange juice and laughing with Kate and considering going over to MCC and all the other things that he’s done in the last 48 hours. 

But it is him. It is him, here with the silence pressing down on his throat like a hundred-pound weight. It is him who was going to the moon, and isn’t anymore.

He isn’t sure how long he stays standing there, but eventually he lets out a long breath and leans over to tuck the remote behind a cushion, where it’ll inevitably disappear somewhere into the couch, and then wanders into the kitchen with a bitter taste still lingering in his mouth. If Natasha were here she’d definitely be kicking his ass and telling him to stop moping around and do something with himself, and as he pours himself a bowl of cereal he realizes why everything feels out of place, turned upside down and never righted. Yeah, he’s upset about the landing - who wouldn’t be? - but really, he just misses his best friend.

Clint’s so out of it that he doesn’t notice Lucky wandering into the room until he lays down on top of his feet and lets out a contented snuffle. He sets down the box of Rice Krispies still in his hand and sits down on the floor next to him, burying his fingers in his fur.

“God, Luck, this sucks,” he mumbles, shutting his eyes and leaning back against the side of the counter. “I just - I don’t even know anymore. Maybe I’ll just take a nap. For a week.”

Lucky stares balefully up at him, dark eyes very wide. Clint looks away, acting fascinated with the pattern on the floor tiles, telling himself at the same time that avoiding his fucking dog just means that he’s a pathetic mess of a human being and should either get blackout drunk or go outside. 

Lucky nudges encouragingly against Clint’s hand, and even though he isn’t sure which option that means, he could hazard a pretty good guess. Still, though, he stays on the floor for another minute before he groans and hauls himself to his feet.

“Okay, okay, walk it is. C’mon, you big lump.” An excited bark follows him out of the kitchen as he goes to change out of his pajamas and into a SHIELD sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, grabbing Lucky’s leash from the hook on the wall on his way back to the door. 

As much as he’s loath to admit it, going outside does help, replacing the staleness of his apartment with crisp April air. Lucky bounces along, chasing sticks and butterflies and yanking Clint along with him, and he finds he doesn’t mind all that much. There is one tense moment when he meets one of his neighbours in the park, one of the ones who’s bothered to get to know him enough to remember that he’s an astronaut, but even though she does demand an explanation she isn’t too sickeningly pitying about it, and her girlfriend promises to bring some food over and Clint comes away from the whole experience feeling more alright than he thought he would.

It’s past noon by the time he lets himself back into his apartment, a tired-out Lucky flopping down into his bed and immediately falling asleep. He briefly considers making himself lunch, but as he stares at his collection of pots from where he’s deposited himself on the couch, he finds that his body has somehow turned to lead. There’s something about the connection between apathy and depression that he thinks Natasha might’ve made him read once, but like he’s told her a million times, he isn’t depressed, at least not clinically. He’s just lazy. 

After laying on the couch flipping between channels for a couple hours, Clint concludes that he might be a little bit depressed. Nothing seems to hold his interest for more than twenty minutes or so, and he ends up feeling like he’s trapped in his own body, looking out powerlessly as time passes him by. In his defense, with the last few days he’s had, it’s perfectly within his right - it feels like a week has gone by in two days. Brynn and her girlfriend come by at some point to drop off some curry and make small talk for a bit, and although the curry is excellent, he can do little more than poke at it, his appetite practically nonexistent. 

When he looks out the window after they leave he notices, albeit a bit detachedly, that he’s managed to waste away the entire day, setting sun casting ripples of colour across the darkening sky. It’s barely eight in the evening, but there’s a prickling behind his right temple that suggests an impending headache and he really, really just wants to go back to bed, again.

“My life is a mess,” he tells the house. “I’m also talking to my house. Which does not talk back.”

He lets out a long groan and drops down to sit on the floor in the corner where the couch meets the wall.

“I am not drunk enough for this.” The house still doesn’t respond, but he has to try hard to convince himself that it isn’t a sign that he’s going mad when the voice in his head does, replaying back Kate’s words from the morning. _Go outside...call me, call Jasper._  

“Well, Katie,” he says aloud, “I tried outside already.” And it had helped, sure, but the moment he’d made it back indoors everything had come crashing back in again. As for the next two options…

He picks up his phone, pulls up Kate’s number on the screen and stares at it for a long time. Every time he tries to press call, though, he pulls his finger back at the last moment and goes back to staring. Even when he tries switching to Jasper’s line and calling him instead, he still can’t bring himself to hit the green button. He isn’t sure whether it’s because he’s avoiding them or that he doesn’t want to talk or if it’s out of some twisted sense of self-preservation - from what, he isn’t sure - but finally he swears and closes everything altogether, barely resisting the urge to toss the phone across the room. 

“Fuck, fucking fuck my life,” he grumbles, headache flaring into full force against the inside of his head. “I’m goin’ to bed.” 

He really shouldn’t be surprised that that doesn’t work either, but due to his increasingly annoying tendency to underestimate his own stupidity, he is. He tries, he really does, squeezing his eyes shut and turning away from the sliver of light that shines under his door. He runs trajectory calculations in his head, CSM fuel stats, launch timelines, you name it. At one point he even attempts the breathing exercises that Natasha likes to do before missions, and when that only seems to serve to make him more twitchy, tries pacing around the room hoping it’ll tire him out. In the end, though, he ends up where he should’ve expected: staring up into the blackness, seething at himself.

“Oh, come _on!_ ” he whines when he looks at the clock to find that it’s barely eleven, meaning that he’s only been tossing and turning for less than three hours. His headache is still hammering away and his palms are clammy and he’s fighting the urge to press his hand against his breastbone in a futile attempt to dull the ache sitting heavy in his chest, fighting the part of his brain telling him that he’s falling apart. In a fit of pique he throws the covers aside and storms out into the living room, cursing loudly and squinting at the lights suddenly inundating his eyes. 

Before his brain’s really caught up with what he’s doing, he’s already grabbed his phone off the floor and is punching in a number from muscle memory. 

 

* * *

 

Natasha sets her overnight bag down on a chair in the crew quarantine room disguised as a very nice hotel suite and takes a moment to stretch her arms over her head, feeling uncharacteristically worn out. They’ve spent the past three days alternating between a series of simulations very obviously designed to test whether or not their new team, _her_ new team, can do the job just as well as her old one, and a truly unnecessary amount of press conferences, and honestly if she’d known how much this would take out of all of them she might’ve seriously considered just saying no.

They’re ready, though. She’s convinced of that, if anything. And they're well on their way to being friends, which is just a bonus. 

“Guys,” Sam’s voice comes from behind her, and she turns around to find him looking out the window at the launch complex and grinning like a loon. “Guys, we’re going to the moon.”

A startled laugh bursts from her mouth, and she finds herself smiling too as she steps up to join him.

“Maybe it’s a good thing you’re not doing the navigating tomorrow; we might find ourselves on Mars by accident,” she jokes. 

“Shut up, Nat, you know that isn’t what I meant.” She smirks at him for another second before following his gaze out the window to where their Saturn is lit up with white lights from top to bottom, resplendent against the Florida night. The sight catches and holds her gaze for a indeterminable length of time, and suddenly she’s overtaken by a rush of emotion almost identical to the one she’d gotten the first time she’d seen the surface of the moon up close and personal, wonder and fear and a great sense of loneliness all wrapped up into a lump in her throat.

“I didn’t really get it til right now,” Steve’s voice comes from behind them, stealing the thought right out of Natasha’s mouth. “Like, I got, you know, ‘we’re going to the moon,’ but not really _we’re going to the moon_ , tomorrow, the three of us.”

“See? Steve gets it,” Sam says. Out of the corner of her eye Natasha can see them grinning at each other like idiots, and she wonders idly whether being confined to a space the size of a minivan and a half might get them to notice that they've been smitten fools since day one. 

“We're really going, aren't we?” she can't stop herself from saying, some of that same incredulity getting the better of her. 

“Yeah, we are.”

They stay standing together by the window, looking at the rocket poised to carry them into the history books. At this time tomorrow they’ll be in low earth orbit preparing to fire the big engines that will carry them out into the unknown, leave the earth in the rearview, but for all the wonder she can’t shake the bitter taste in her mouth that’s lingered since she’d let herself out of Clint’s room two days ago with half a bottle of scotch, two empty glasses, and a heavy heart. 

_Clint should be here,_ she thinks, taking one last look before turning away and heading for the comfortable-looking couch next to one of the beds. She likes Sam just fine, thinks he's a good pilot and a good man and very possibly someone she can be friends with, but right now she wants _Clint_ beside her, looking out at the Saturn and wondering in his self-deprecating way how he ever got from middle-of-nowhere Indiana to here. He deserves to be here, and they deserve to have this one mission, this penultimate moment, together. This was supposed to be their magnum opus, the end of the line for their careers as astronauts but oh, what a glorious end. It was just a stroke of bad luck that landed them in this clusterfuck, and if she were a more superstitious person she would wonder if this is a bad omen for the rest of the mission ahead. 

Thing is, though, she didn't get this far with the history she has without losing a couple bags along the way, and one of those just happened to be superstition. Why rely on something so seemingly unreasonable when she could survive just fine on skill? 

_It's all gonna be fine,_ she thinks, even though she isn't quite sure who she's trying to convince. 

Her phone rings a second later, muffled from where it sits at the bottom of her suitcase so she could smuggle it through the quarantine check but still unmistakably the theme song to _2001: A Space Odyssey._  

“You’re not supposed to-” Steve is saying, but her heart is doing a weird twisty thing somewhere in her chest and she’s lunging for it, riffling desperately through the bag until the metal slides into her hand.

“Clint?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oooooo cliffhanger.....first but not the last x  
> comments and kudos make my world


	5. heavy handed longings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi hello short one today! college orientation has got me WIPED im so fucking tired. pray for me  
> enjoy!! <3

Natasha picks up on the second ring, sounding for all the world soft and sleepy like she’s just woken up, but there’s an edge to her voice that he can’t quite place over the phone. 

“Hey, Nat. Did I wake you?” he says, and he’s shocked at how wrecked his voice sounds, like he hasn’t spoken for days. This, he chides himself, is why we use our brains before doing things. God’s sakes, she’s _launching_ in the morning, what is he doing bothering her?

“No, you didn’t. What’s wrong?” He wants to bristle at her automatic assumption that something is wrong, can’t he call his best friend for no reason?

The rational part of his brain, the one that’s been running away screaming for most of the day, knows better.

_Nothing_ , he means to say, but it sticks in his throat like toffee. It isn’t nothing. It’s never nothing. He’s a mess, and he just needs to hear her voice right now.

“Can’t sleep,” is the response he finally settles on. Her sigh on the other end comes in a sharp sweep, like a knife wound, but her voice is quiet and infinitely comforting when it follows, and just like always it’s like a balm to his frazzled nerves.

“Me neither.” And that, that little admission of vulnerability, that something isn’t quite right with her either, sends something breaking wide open inside him.

“I miss you.” The words leave him in one great rush. “I wanna be there, crawl into your bed at three in the morning like I did last time - god, you should’ve kicked me out, we were so tired in the morning.” The soft sound of her laugh makes him smile in spite of himself. He imagines himself sitting on the floor next to her, knees bumping, taking stupid pictures because she always smuggles her phone in and they can never catch her at it. “I wanna fly with you, Nat. I want...”

He doesn’t have the words to express the feeling in his chest, like a wet cardboard box tearing apart. “I wish none of this had ever happened,” he finishes on the end of an exhale. It’s the only thing he can think of.

“Lord of the Rings, Clint, really?” Nat huffs, but there’s a thousand responses hidden behind that one exhalation of breath.

“Look, if someone’s said it better than me? I don’t have to reinvent the wheel.” He means for it to come out teasing, flippant because no matter _what_ Clint Barton does flippant better than anyone else, but something about the fact that he’s sitting on his living room floor at eleven pm, being blinded by his own lamp and calling Natasha the day before launch on the phone she isn’t supposed to have turns his voice quiet, almost petulant - and _tired,_ so, _so_ tired, so much he winces at it.

“No, you don’t,” she says, and he has a feeling they aren’t talking about reinventing the wheel anymore. Knowing Nat, though, it could be a million things - he doesn’t have to worry, doesn’t have to feel bad, doesn’t have to beat himself up, doesn’t have to something. “Don’t worry, Clint, okay?” 

“About you?” he asks. “Never.” _Always._

Silence, long and dragging, and he almost starts wondering whether she’s hung up on him.

“I miss you too.” She spits it out almost faster than he had just minutes ago, so much so that the syllables blur into one another, but Clint? Clint knows what she said, and more importantly he knows what it means for her to say it. 

“Be safe, Nat.” It’s the only thing he can think to say.

“Go to sleep, Clint.” He hears a soft breath, and then the line goes dead.

Clint lowers the phone from his ear, stares at the wall opposite him without really seeing it at all. The sound of his breath comes too loudly in the sudden silence, the pulse in his throat seeming to rise and break over him. The phone slips from his hand to clatter noisily onto the hardwood floor.

“Be safe, Nat,” he whispers again into the quiet. 

As if directed by some unconscious instinct, he heaves himself up off the floor and back into bed, the weight that’d seemed to lift on the phone returning in full force. Despite the exhaustion dragging at his limbs, it still takes an abnormally long time for him to fall asleep; every time he starts drifting off he’s jerked back to consciousness with the remnants of a horribly forboding feeling in his mouth. 

He dreams once, around the fourth or fifth time he drifts into sleep, the covers tangled hopelessly around his legs. It’s something jumbled, confused, a familiar couch in the spacecraft but every time his hands reach for the instruments it all comes out wrong, a console on the ground that doesn’t belong to him in a room full of people meant to be behind him not next to him, being in two places at once as air rushes from a room and he jerks up breathing out dregs of air leaks and death and destruction.

Curses rip themselves desperately out of his throat, and he throws himself out of bed and heads for the living room, phone in his hand and fingers flying over the keys before he's quite conscious of what he's doing.

_Good luck,_ reads the text he sends to Natasha. A little knot of discomfort slips out of the base of his throat and settles deep into his stomach.

Good luck isn't something they say to each other, luck isn't something they call upon in general; the saying in the astronaut corps is that all luck is bad luck because if you need it, something has already gone terribly wrong. 

But this isn't a time for normal, this isn't a time for tradition, this is his world wobbling frantically on its axis and him trying to set it right without knowing quite how to do it. He shoves the discomfort out of his mind and goes back towards his room, leaving his phone where he'd found it. 

He passes out as soon as he stumbles back into bed, contorted uncomfortably under the covers.

 

* * *

 

Natasha stares at the blank screen of her phone for a second, reeling. Steve is somewhere over her left shoulder, and she registers that she’s sitting on the floor with him kneeling behind her, Sam hovering anxiously behind him. 

“Natasha, Natasha are you alright?” he’s saying. Dragging herself back to reality feels like struggling through quicksand, but with an effort she pulls herself to her feet and tucks her phone back into her duffle, staring down at it for a long minute before sweeping some of her clothes over the silver backing and trying to wipe it all from her mind at the same time. 

“Natasha?” Sam tries.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she snaps, not turning around. A suspicious silence meets her words, and she turns to meet their eyes, feeling guilty. “Let’s just get to bed, we’ve got an early start tomorrow.” Neither of them move. 

“Guys, really,” she says, trying her best to soften her gaze, her stance against her impulse to lock up her own vulnerability. “Everything’s fine. Clint says good luck.” 

He hadn’t, of course, but she thinks that’s the right thing to say. It appears to be; Steve sighs explosively and glances out the window again, eyes finding the moon without fail. There’s a sadness in his gaze when he looks back at her and nods once. 

“Goodnight, Natasha.” He turns towards his room, and Natasha doesn’t miss when Sam puts a hand tentatively on his shoulder, nor when Steve grasps it back.

“Night, Commander.”

“Night.” She waits until they’ve both disappeared into their quarters to pull her phone out of her bag again. Clint’s contact is still blinking on the screen, and her finger edges towards the redial button before she stops herself. Her feet carry her over to the window that Steve had just looked out of, and she stays standing there in the patch of silvery moonlight, looking down at Clint’s grinning face smushed up against hers in the simulator.

They're never going to have that again, she thinks distantly. She'd decided already, before all of this, that 13 would be her last mission, the landing as the capstone to her astronaut career. No matter how much she wants to have a mission with Clint, to struggle through the quagmire of training with him by her side, she's still sticking with it. She's blazed enough trails for a lifetime. 

The text alert on her phone has her looking down sharply, wondering who would be texting her now - everyone who texts her knows she's in quarantine. The answer becomes clear as soon as she opens it. 

> _< <mcdumbass, 23:55. good luck.>>_

A hot bubble of fury rises in her chest before she can stop it, and she exits out of her messages with a sharp slash of an index finger. Good luck? Really? They don't say good luck, her and Clint. In fact, the only SHIELD superstition she's ever followed is that one - not because of the superstition but because luck just isn't in the equation for her. She'll live or die by her own hand, not by fate's. 

But when she pauses, looks back at her phone and opens the text again and stares at the two innocuous words against the grey of the text bubble, she understands. This is him telling her, in the only way that he can, that he thinks she can do this without him. He's sending luck because he knows she doesn't need it. 

She doesn't reply, but she doesn't need to. Instead she stows her phone away again, this time powered off and not to be touched until she's on the ground at the end of this mission, and finally heads for her room.  

With the amount of time she’s spent in this quarantine suite she’s noticed that all the windows seem to face out towards the launch complex, and while she’s brushing her teeth she keeps looking out at their rocket, the rising moon poised perfectly above the reaching tip like it was hung there. The last thing she sees before she falls asleep is the shadow of a cloud moving across the moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope y'all liked! comments / kudos would make my day uwu  
> i'm on tumblr [here](https://hillromanov.tumblr.com) im on semi-hiatus for college but if u ask me anything abt this fic i will be sure to respond bcs i will never pass on a chance to talk abt it


	6. take me where i cannot stand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha oops its been seven weeks welcome to post midterm szn aka pre finals szn the grind never stops  
> this is a long one to hopefully make up for the 100000 year wait (and the 10000 year wait for the next one too)

Rhodey comes to wake them a little before 6 in the morning, trailed by a valet pushing a cart laden with bacon and eggs. They eat in silence, only broken by the clink of silverware against ceramic and the muffled sounds of glasses being picked up and set down again, each of them caught up in their own thoughts.

After breakfast they're marched out to a van and driven over to the clean room in the VAB, the carefully scheduled plan moving along like clockwork. Steve sits in the left-hand seat, back ramrod straight, the only thing breaking through his control his hand tapping a pattern against the cushions. Sam's sprawled across from him, picture of nonchalance, but the same tension runs through the lines of his body. As for Natasha herself, she sits in front of them, perfectly steady. Her own control is and always has been the only thing that gets her through launch day intact. 

The suit-up process is hours upon hours, first shower then final medical exams then the painstaking attachment of sixteen biomedical sensors, med team hovering behind each technician to ensure accuracy. Only then can the protective layers of suit be put on, undergarments then flight suit and then finally the bulky EVA suit. At the end of it all they can barely move in regular gravity, needing technicians' help to slide the components of the suit together. 

The oxygen tubing is being plugged into the front of Natasha's suit when Sam turns and grins at her, looking giddy, his helmet already on and a technician fussing with the handheld oxygenator they need for the short walk out to the capsule. She grins back, tilting her head for her own helmet to be slid on, the latches clicking securely shut. Steve flashes her a thumbs up from across the bay before his hand is covered by a white glove, and, already without proper usage of her hand, she settles for a wink back. 

Before she knows it they're being handed their oxygenators and ushered out of the clean room for the ride over to the launch complex. The press is waiting for them the moment they emerge from the double doors, but as usual Rhodey meets them halfway, just when all the waving and smiling starts to tip over from exhilarating to aggravating, and clears the path to the van. 

They sit side by side on one of the long benches occupying the right-hand wall of the van, Natasha and then Sam and then Steve with Rhodey occupying the bench on the other wall. It's quiet, like it's been all morning; it isn't nervous, per se, but there's a distinct tension, like a spring being turned tighter and tighter before it releases. Sam is sitting up now, all traces of his previous lassitude gone, and even though Steve looks as stoic as ever, his bearing is different, shoulders back and feet apart, betraying his military past. By wont of several missions' worth of practice Natasha keeps herself steady, but still she can feel the building apprehension, the calm before the break of the storm.

When the van pulls up to the bottom of the launchpad Rhodey hops out and opens the back, letting them climb out. Here there's no press corps, confined to the cordoned-off viewing areas. It's just the four of them and the Saturn, towering majestic before their eyes.

In unspoken agreement they stand together for a minute, just looking up at the behemoth, letting it sink in that the day is here. They're going today, ready or not.

Rhodey clears his throat, glances at his watch. The time has come. Natasha is the first to move, picking up her oxygenator and moving towards the elevator at the foot of the gantry, and she knows Sam and Steve are following in her wake. Rhodey holds the door open for them, shares one more glance with each in turn.

And then the metal grating clangs shut, and they're moving upwards. The big red letters spelling out UNITED STATES OF AMERICA appear one by one in reverse as they rise higher and higher, past the three stages of booster and up towards the command module.

It feels like there should be music, big swelling orchestral sounds accompanying their processional down the causeway, coming to a climax as they slide into their seats. Of course, it isn't anything as glamourous as that - only Natasha and her crew and a launch technician bringing up the rear, and clambering into the low-slung crew couches in several dozen pounds of spacesuit is about as unfit for a musical high as it gets. But, music or no, even though this is Natasha's third time doing this and her second atop a Saturn, it feels new and exhilarating and nerve-wracking and exactly how a launch is meant to feel, and that's good enough for her. She's here to fly a mission, not star in a film. _Ex luna, scientia_ : their mission motto. From the moon, knowledge. They are scientists, and the public does not care, and that has always been okay for her. She isn’t in it for the glory.

The heavy outer door clicks shut and the latches thud into place, and a second later oxygen hisses into their helmets and the comm links come to life.

"Launch Control, this is Thirteen. Comms check." 

“Thirteen, Launch Control. Reading you loud and clear.” The command module continues humming to life around them. “T minus thirty minutes to launch.” 

Clint swims up out of unconsciousness with all the grace of a dead whale. His mouth tastes like something died in it, and when he shifts under the covers he finds his limbs stiff from the contorted position he’d fallen asleep in. He’s had less than five hours of sleep.

Later on, he’ll blame that for the decision he makes.

“Clinton Francis Barton,” Kate groans through the phone line. “You’d better be at death’s door. It is four in the _fucking_ morning.”

“Yeah, tha‘s what I said when I woke up, too.” He takes a swig from his coffee. “How is this very fine morning for you?”

“Brilliant. Until you woke me up. At _four in the morning._ ” He winces as her voice breaks into a shriek.

“Hey, not so loud. As you keep emphasizing, it _is_ four in the morning.”

“Yeah, okay. What are you doing, how drunk are you, and how much do I need to pay to break you out of jail?”

“Driving, not, and I wasn’t planning on a jail sentence today unless something goes really wrong. Your support means a lot to me, though.”

“Clinton. Where are you.”

“I-10.”

“You are _not._ ”

“I’m not.”

“You’re lying to me.” The laugh that’s been fighting to break out of him finally does, sending him choking on his mouthful of espresso.

“Yeah, I am,” he replies as soon as his airway is clear. There’s a noise that sounds somewhat like a hand meeting a forehead.

“You’re an idiot,” she says. “Have fun at the launch.”

The line goes dead.

He tucks the phone into the cupholder and lets out a sigh. Belatedly, he realizes that he wanted for her to talk him out of going, wanted for her to know to stop the stupid self-destructive cycle that he’s dragging himself into.

“It’s just a fucking mission,” he chides himself, pressing down on the gas pedal and sending the car leaping forward.

The acceleration is but a poor facsimile of the rush of adrenaline he’s craving, the horsepower purring beneath his feet a poor substitute for hypergolics and five monster engines. It feels like he’s about to buzz out of his skin, an addict waiting for a fix he’ll inevitably be denied.

Down at the Cape, the crew is beginning the suit-up process.

There’s something quiet and jazzy on the radio, left on from god knows how long ago. A few flicks at the stereo system switch it to drums and shouting, fast and loud and he rolls the windows down and speeds up even more until the car is practically flying over the pavement but none of it comes anywhere close to what he knows he needs. He needs a space suit pulled tight across his chest, flight gloves on his hands and helmet on his head, the rumble of a Saturn under him and the expanse of space above, a crew – his crew – in the seats beside him and their MCC team in their ears. _That’s_ what he needs, and not even a fast car and a highway to drive it on can replace it.

A few minutes later he starts fiddling with the radio again. He goes a couple miles with classical, a few more with classic rock and the next with the poppy tunes Kate likes, even tries the news in the vain hope that it’ll hold his attention. Nothing works.

Finally, he taps into the “secret” channel he installed – read, got Tony to hack into – that links him right into the squawk box chatter coming from MCC and the Cape. They’re at one of the built-in holds in the countdown, waiting for a few last systems checks from the pad techs before continuing to fuel the rocket’s massive tanks.

“Launch Control, clean room. Crew through medical checks, beginning suit up.” Clint glances at the clock on the radio. T minus three hours to launch.

Those are simultaneously the longest and shortest three hours of his life. He slows down eventually, to just a tad above the speed limit because today, of all days, is not the day to get pulled over for speeding. The chatter from the squawk box is calming in a way nothing else has been, and when he hears “Crew ingress into capsule” while stopped fifty miles out for gas, it hurts less than he’d have thought.

When he pulls off the highway and onto the Canaveral backroads, he bypasses the crowded viewing areas and instead occupies a grassy field just outside of the cordoned perimeter with literal minutes to spare. When he gets out of the car and shoves the door shut behind him, his eye is drawn immediately to the Saturn, standing proudly against the Florida sky. If he squints, he can just barely make out the command module perched atop the colossal column. 

There’s a flicker of movement near the tip of the rocket - the gantryway and the green room, swinging slowly out of its impending path. The hatch will have just shut for the last time until splashdown, and the whump-shudder of the fuel pumps disengaging have reverberated through the cabin from a thousand feet below. He remembers, clear as day, the first time he'd ridden aboard a Saturn; the realization that they were going, really going, when the fuel pumps had cut off and the heavy rumble of the engines took their place.

T minus ten. T minus nine.

The image of the rocket blurs, a mirage of heat across the bay. Steam rolls from the base of the stack. 

T minus six. T minus five.

A billow of smoke erupts from beneath the rocket, climbs ravenously up its sides.

T minus three. Main engine start. From where Clint is standing he can just make out the blast of orange flame before the cloud devours it whole, obscuring the rocket’s bottom third as it fights to break free of gravity. 

And then the first gantry swings free of the stack, the engines winning their battle.

Liftoff.

And the Saturn fairly leaps from the ground, buoyed atop a pillar of fire and trailing a string of smoke. The engine bells clear the tower and Clint glances at his watch - 13:13, right on schedule. 

The clock is running.

He tips his head back, shading his eyes with one hand as he tracks the rocket, punching its way up through the atmosphere at 6000 miles an hour. It finishes its arrow-straight trajectory and pitches over to angle up towards the stratosphere, flowing towards the point of the escape tower and piercing a hole into the clouds. The roiling orange clouds of flame trail for miles behind it.

"C'mon, baby," he whispers, watching it reappear above the cloud cover, receding more and more by the second. The contrail stretching up from the launchpad is already scattering. "C'mon."

 

* * *

 

"Roll is complete, we are pitching!" Natasha shouts into her comm, straining to be heard over the roar of the five massive engines in the Saturn's first stage. The sky out the small porthole window has long since passed the filmy white of cloud cover, darkness bleeding into a cream of light blue until, like crossing a line, it all goes pitch black. The cabin is vibrating madly, sending her teeth chattering, but the bright orange numbers on the mission clock still etch themselves into her retinas. At this moment they're burning at a slight slant, halfway through the atmosphere and heading up towards the last vestiges of the stratosphere and on their way into orbit. 

"Saturn I-B staging in T minus thirty seconds," comes Wanda Maximoff's voice through each of their headsets. Natasha finds herself grinning with exhilaration. 

"Get ready for a jolt, boys!" she shouts, and all three of them brace themselves against the metal frames of the collapsible couches. Almost as soon as the words leave her mouth the big engines cut out, jerking them forwards until their faceplates are inches from the instrument panel. The metallic clank of the firing bolts resounds through the capsule, and then the second stage engines start back up and throw them back into their seats. 

"Some jolt," Sam grouses from next to her. Out the window the spent first stage falls away. The sky is almost fully black now, stars pinpricks upon the curtain. 

"T minus thirty seconds to-" she starts. 

An orange light comes to life on the instrument panel, followed by the insistent beeping of a master alarm. The light indicating the middle engine, number five, is flashing on and off. Engine failure. 

"Houston, Thirteen. We're showing a premature cutoff on engine 5, please confirm," Steve calls. 

"Thirteen, Houston. We're reading the same. Stand by." Unbidden, Natasha's gaze flickers to the large grey handle by her right hand. The engraved collar reads ABORT in big black letters.

The seconds ticking by are loud as bullets in the enclosed space of her mind. One twist of her wrist and the explosive bolts attached to the bottom of the command module will fire. One twist of her wrist and five retrorockets, spaced evenly around the elliptical base of the escape tower, will blossom to life, pulling the capsule away from the floundering rocket.

One twist of her wrist, and their mission is over. 

"Houston, any news on that engine?" she calls. She doesn't dare raise her hand, made clumsy by inertia and the confines of a space suit, towards the lever. The master alarm keeps beeping its warning song, audible even over the roar of one thousand gallons of hypergolic fuels being transformed into one million pounds of thrust. 

"Standby, Thirteen," Wanda says again, each accented t cracking sharply into Natasha's ear. Her eyes flicker towards the handle again. The escape tower will jettison in sixty seconds. After that, there's no going back, gimp engine or no. If they can't reach full earth orbit, their glorious moon mission will be nothing but several decaying cycles around the globe, bound by the gravity they're seeking to escape. 

"Thirteen, Houston. Roll and trim are looking good without engine five, so if you just burn the other four for a little longer than normal, you'll be fine as long as we don't lose another one." 

"Roger." Natasha nods at Sam, who's already inputting the new parameters into the CSM computers. She edges her hand away from the abort lever. “Escape tower jettison in ten seconds."

Ten seconds later Steve reaches forwards through the g forces, flips up a plastic cover and presses the button underneath, triggering both the retrorockets and the firing bolts on the escape tower. Light suddenly streams into the command module as the covering over the main window disappears, and a few seconds later the escape tower tumbles past the bottom of the spacecraft and vanishes, on a direct track to a firey burnup in the atmosphere. 

“Main engine cutoff, on my mark," Sam calls. The clock ticks over a few more seconds, four engines roaring behind them. 

“Mark." Natasha hits shutdown. The engines cut off. Their couch restraints begin to strain under their newly weightless bodies. 

“Houston, we have shutdown." Silence reigns for another second. 

“Roger, Thirteen. Prepare for SIIB jettison and LM rendezvous." They look at each other for a second, and then Sam grins. 

“Looks like we just had our glitch for this mission!" Ever since Apollo 8, the doctrine of one major glitch per moon flight has taken hold in the astronaut corps, whether it be 8's navigational failure, 10's LM malfunction, or the infamous Apollo 12 lightning strike that had made Phil Coulson a steely-eyed missileman. If it gets resolved, and so far it always has, the rest of the flight seems to reel off flawlessly. Hopefully, they've just had theirs.

“Copy that," she says, grins back at him, and then starts unbuckling her restraints. Steve follows suit. They have ten orbits around the earth to prepare for trans-lunar injection, and then one last go-no go before they're headed for the moon. There's no time to dawdle around, even, and especially, because they've just gotten through their glitch. 

Some time later, she slips out of her center couch and relinquishes control of the CSM to Sam. He’d succumbed to a bout of space sickness right after he'd floated out of his seat - thankfully, he'd taken off his suit already - but he seems fairly raring to go now that he's in the hot seat.

“Okay, Houston, Nat and I have exchanged seats and I’m now in the pilot’s. Getting ready for SIV-B jettison and LM capture,” Sam calls, buckling himself into the couch and fitting his palm around the attitude controller. Natasha, per his words, is ensconced in his center seat, polishing the lens on the scope before she snaps it into place over the window. Steve is floating in the lower equipment bay, camera in hand in his capacity as mission photographer.

“Roger that, Thirteen. You’re go for separation whenever you’re ready.” Sam looks up at the instrument panel and flips up a plastic cover to press a steady finger against the button beneath. The spacecraft jerks, three sharp thumps reverberating through the cabin, and the CSM drifts forwards, encouraged along by a burst on the attitude jets.

“Confirm separation, Houston.” Sam keeps station, waiting for the response.

“Separation confirmed, Thirteen,” volleys back a minute later. “You are go for LM capture.” With a twist of Sam’s wrist the spacecraft swivels until they’re head-on with the Saturn, three flower-petals drifting away from their vice around the hexagonal crew cabin of the LM. Steve clicks away through the bay windows.

“I got this, guys,” Sam says, dark eyes glittering with concentration as he leans forwards to peer into his scope. Natasha mimics his motion, the spacecraft accelerating and pressing her minutely forwards.

“Two hundred feet,” she calls. They pitch upwards, the titanium docking port sliding into view in the crosshairs. It feels like they’re barely moving forwards, though – much slower than they’ve ever gone with either Clint or Sam at the jets.

Tension thrums down her fingertips, and she curls them into fists to hide the twitches. The docking port wavers in the scope.

They keep drifting forwards.

“One fifty feet.” The CSM is rolling slightly clockwise, the littlest bit of torque from the separation.

They hadn’t simulated that.

“Watch that yaw,” Steve calls up. Sam nods, swivelling his hand to fire a counterclockwise burst from the jets. The rotation steadies, but as they hit a hundred feet it begins again, this time counterclockwise. The glint of the docking port still sits dead-center in Natasha’s crosshairs, but they can’t dock with that kind of spin. It’ll destroy the port, and any chance of a landing with it.

“ACS is overcorrecting,” Sam mumbles, letting out a growl of frustration as the spin reverses again. “Houston, I’m switching to manual.”

He barely waits for a bemused confirmation before leaning up and toggling ACS to manual. Steve's head pops into view, eyebrow arched.

“Auto’s overcorrecting,” he explains, glancing between Steve and Natasha and grinning. “Don’t worry. I’ve got this.” Steve gives a strained smile and retreats.

Nick Fury’s White Team is manning the consoles in Houston, with Administrator Ross and Chief Astronaut Rhodes occupying the observers’ stations in the back row. The air is thick with cigarette smoke.

The spacecraft is still close enough to Earth that they can see the telemetry updates in real time, but the docking scopes are analog and the movements of the CSM are miniscule on the scale that Mission Control usually tracks. No one really knows what’s happening up there, outside of the astronauts’ sporadic status reports.

A few people trade concerned looks when the yaw angles start shifting, and more when the toggle-switch ACS display flips over to manual.

“If Wilson can’t dock that thing, we don’t have a mission,” TELMU Jimmy Woo mumbles out of the side of his mouth. EECOM Jasper Sitwell nods absentmindedly from the next chair, eyes fixed on the plot boards.

The yaw straightens out, and one or two relieved breaths fall into the silence, but the majority of the controllers remain tense, eyes on the meager information they can divine out of the telemetry beaming back from the spacecraft. Without a lunar module, there can be no moon landing, and the second-highest sim failure rate for CSM pilots is the docking, nipping right at the heels of reentry. High pressure for a pilot who’s only been back in the cockpit three days.

“C’mon, rookie,” Rhodey mumbles from his seat in the back row. “Park that thing.”

“Ten feet.” They’re moving so slowly it can barely be classified as slow, but the incessant rotation of the spacecraft has failed to return, and the glimmer of the target rests exactly on the scope crosshairs. The proximity warning beeps out a ditty as the probe passes the docking collar.

The sound of metal scraping against metal reverberates through the command module, and Sam twists the attitude controller. Steve’s head pops out of the equipment bay again, worry written plainly across his features, but a second later the clamps thump into place and the indicator goes barber pole.

“And retract,” Natasha orders, and Sam twists a lever on the instrument panel, locking the explosive bolts over the rim of the probe and sealing the two craft together.

“Houston, we have hard dock.” One backwards touch of the jets and the LM slides smoothly free from the Saturn. They shift to hold station with the expended rocket – it, too, is going to the moon, albeit for a much harder landing.

“Roger that, Thirteen, good work. You’re off to the Fra Mauro highlands.” Steve swims back into view, shoots Sam a grin and heads off to stow the cameras. Natasha busies herself inputting the translunar injection coordinates into the computer to hide her smile.

If the spacecraft were passing over Houston in the moment it takes its first step out of Earth’s orbit, a curious observer might have seen a flash of light filter down through the haze, like headlights coming over a hill on a foggy night. In Mission Control, all that marks the moment is a confirmation from Capcom and a go from FIDO Leo Fitz, and the plot boards switching from a map of the Earth to a longer trajectory sporting the entirety of the flight plan, the position of the spacecraft marked by a triangle.

“Copy TLI,” Flight Director Nick Fury confirms on the controllers’ loop. A subdued buzz runs through the room.

“Alright, everyone, we’re going to the moon!”

                                                        

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> officially on hiatus on tumblr [@hillromanov](https:/hillromanov.tumblr.com) but if u come yell at me about ex astris i guarantee you i will respond and gush over you until you tell me to shut up. comments and kudos get me through the day.

**Author's Note:**

> i would die for comments and kudos <3 updates once every week or two hopefully
> 
> i'm on tumblr [here](https://mariahiill.tumblr.com)


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